Today’s retail landscape is more competitive than ever. Brands have to rely and work with not only brick-and-mortar chains, but with websites around the world, many of which operate on thinner margins. Brands that are trying to break through are facing an increasingly difficult disrupted marketplace, where new competitors seem to appear almost every day.

Meanwhile, an array of new technologies enable brands to deliver personalized experiences to millions of individual customers in real time. Analytics, both on the web and in-store, provide detailed insights on customers’ interests and purchase patterns, along with increasingly accurate predictions about what they’re likely to buy next month. Brands and retailers are leveraging this data to streamline their sales funnels, achieving greater efficiently every year.

In this increasingly competitive marketplace, personalized customer experiences are no longer just a nice bonus. They’re the only thing preventing your customers from switching to another brand that seems to understand them better. With a tremendous amount of money being spent getting foot traffic in stores, personalized experiences can be used to point consumers towards desired products, in hopes of making a sale. Here’s how visual experiences can enable more engaging experiences, more empowered sales teams, and an improved bottom line for your brand.

Personalized, connected, data smart experiences

Data comes from a wide range of sources – and ideally, you should be gathering it from all your store’s touchpoints. Interactions on the web, on mobile, and in brick-and-mortar stores can all combine to create customer insights you’d never have gotten from any single source. Add in volunteered data from loyalty programs, and you’ve got all the resources you need to build robust, 360-degree view of your store.

These deep customer insights enable you to deliver more tailored advertising, orchestrating continuously improved customer journeys that span all digital and physical touchpoints. Instead of showing all your customers the same ads, you’ll be able to show offers related to their individual tastes and preferences – both on the web and in your stores. This kind of interactive signage gets more than twice the engagement rate of social media and 24 percent more dwell time than Google’s benchmark.

Beyond advertising, these robust customer insights will enable you to provide best-in-class sales tools to your employees. The latest generation of in store technologies are helping sales associates get to know their customers via opt-in loyalty programs, allowing them to greet customers by name, purchase anywhere, make recommendations to customers, anticipate customer demand and optimize supply chain to meet demand.

With more informed salespeople comes faster, more streamlined, and personalized service. When your customers feel empowered to begin the purchase process on their own devices – and your sales staff can pick up and complete that process at the point of conversion – you’ll see shorter lines, faster checkouts, and smoother flow of foot traffic throughout your store. Since employees will be able to concentrate more on personal customer service, customers will leave happier than ever.

Raising your bottom line

Longer dwell time and shorter lines are all well and good – but how do all these changes perform in terms of return on investment (ROI)? Strikingly well, in fact. Personalized experiences have been shown to contribute to increased revenue and reduced loss in a variety of complementary ways.

Digital signage can also pick up on trends, demographics, patterns, and provide detailed analytics, allowing retailers to better decide how to promote certain items. With this data, retailers can better decide how to spend their advertising dollars. This creates targeted content that has a much better chance at effectively reaching the consumer, ultimately leading to a sale. This can all be done in real time, allowing retailers to minimize waste and spend money when and where it counts.

Personalized experiences are powerful tools for transforming unique spaces into new revenue streams. You could even transform your parking lots into showcases where customers can interact with personalized displays which can help draw them into your store. This may lead to new opportunities in capturing revenue by using these spaces to place digital signage, capture ad revenue and target an untapped audience.

Messaging at the right time is also crucial. Most customers perform their own product research, both at home and in-store. But when shopping in a store, a full 90 percent of shoppers make at least one impulse purchase per trip – often driven by ads or reviews they see on digital signs while at the store.

The more data you’re able to bring together from all channels, the more personalized experiences you’ll be able to serve up at the exact moment when each customer is most likely to consider a purchase. And along the way, your interactive displays will be gathering even more data on your customers’ preferences and behavior, so you can create more targeted, effective outreach, leading to a positive impact on the bottom line.

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